First ah heard a whistle, then ah heard a bum call, ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! C’m’ere!’ Then the other bums were yelling it too and waving their greatcoats, going ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ which ah guess was the name of the mutt. The hobos began to stagger over toward mah pot-hole. Ah looked at the dog and knew ah stood to receive a hard and healthy beating if they caught me, for the hobos were a desperate mob and frequently I had seen them brawling amongst themselves for no apparent reason. Without using mah mouth ah said to the mongrel, to his one dead eye ‘Go to him! Run! Before he gets too close!’ at which the dog span a circle and bounded toward the approaching mob. The leader had his coat off and had bagged the dog in what seemed to be one single motion. Bastard yapped in the hobo’s arms, happy he’d been found. Ah lay in the ditch and watched the mountain of greatcoats huddled across the fire, working furiously.
When Bastard was turning the hobos settled back in their original spots and silently took in his aroma, hungry as hell.
That’s how ah knew ah could speak to dogs.
XI
The Ukulites believed the swampland to be an abomination.
They believed that it would erupt and smite the valley should their God become displeased.
At the school the Ukulite elders would hammer the heads of their children, with a fervour wrought of utter conviction, telling them that it was a diabolic macula on Zion and that within its bounds roamed all the infernal evils of the world. The children, so frightened were they, rarely ventured past the northern city limit.
The workers from the fields and refinery were not so superstitious, but still they referred to it with a certain reticence.
Only once had Euchrid seen these brave and brawling men enter it. The fact that there were vast areas of residential space uninhabited at the swamp end of the valley, and that the opposite end, the south end, literally spilled with its occupants, indicated that the workers and their families looked toward the place with more than a little apprehension.
The hobos who were driven from the town and residential areas and made to wander its surrounding vicinage whimpered at each other’s baleful tales of nights spent lost in its darksome umbrage, and while slugging greedily on bottles of raw liquor and spitting into the open night-fire they would look through the devilish flames at the great black shape of the swampland and, shaking, throw back another longer, deeper slug.
Euchrid was barely ten years old when he first felt himself drawn toward it.
Ah cannot, in all honesty, state the exact age ah was when ah first entered the swampland. What’s more ah cannot pin-point any one day and say – this day was the day on which ah first ventured into the swampland. No, ah can’t.
For it seems to me that ah had always been drawn to this grim and murky place where ordinary souls would not dare to venture: where the mist lifts off the compost that lines the floor and hangs amongst the woven ceiling of vine and branch like an artificial sky – where the tall, thin trees all seem to bend toward me in attitudes of worship – where a million lumping shadows collide and circle, collide and circle, trunk to scrub – all, in secret, shifting through dim manoeuvres betrayed by jets of nostril steam. At the time it seemed to me – being little more than a decade old – that ah had spent a lifetime in this place, that ah had always walked upon sodden uncertain ground, breathed, heavy air and pushed mah bare hand into the crawling hearts of a thousand rotten stumps, that ah had always worn a black web for a veil. So the urge to slip across the marsh flats that separated the circle of swampland from the shack where ah lived seemed natural enough. Not that ah bounded in! O no! Not bounded in!
The first few times ah believe ah only ventured a number of yards inside the damp spissitude of the swampland. Ah found the heavy scented air exhausting and confounding and it spooked me a little that mah nervous footfall faltered on the strange layered substratum of mushed leaf and soft, wet wood.
Skeleton-webs like sticky shrouds clung to mah skin.
Marsh-toads as big as fists swelled and croaked lowly in the gloom. The air hung upon me like an unwanted skin. Mah head swam and mah boots filled.
Yet ah returned to this forbidden place again and again, each sojourn finding me a little deeper within its warm wet heart.
And just as the swampland became, day by day, mah sanctuary and mah comfort, so too the angel did ease herself into mah world.
First there was just a whispered word. Then a flutter overhead. A day or two later, mah name was uttered, sounding strange to me – unrecognizable – for no-one had ever called me by mah name. Next, a flapping shape, darting up amongst the trees, stirred the fog a fraction.
Then, the wing and the silver floating feather – time by time, bit by bit – until at last ah sat upon a slimy log in a tiny clearing, the drugged air draining mah body, mah head in mah hands and mah eyes weary and sore; and ah perceived the air to fan slightly as if it were being beaten gently and ah lifted up mah head, ah think, and the breeze that she stirred was cool and of a heavenly hue.
From the soft forbidden movements of this umbrage she came, only for a moment – a moment too brief – thief of mah heart.
Immersed in a cobalt light, she hovered before me. Her wings beat through mah lungs, fanning up nests and brittle shells and webs and shiny wings and little skeletons and skulls and skins around me. And this visitation, she spoke sweetly to me. She did. ‘I love you, Euchrid,’ she said. ‘Fear not, for I am delivered unto you as your keeper.’
And ah sat back down on the slimy log in the tiny clearing and put mah head back in mah hands feeling weary, aching, drugged. Looking up again, the clearing was like it had been before – dark and murky – and what looked like a falling knife, spinning down from above, came toward mah heart. A silver feather pierced the damp fabric of mah shirt.
BOOK ONE
THE RAIN
I
Harvest time in the year of 1941 and the sun ached in the sky and all around me the swollen air throbbed, holding me warmly as ah, in turn, damply warmed unto it, our sullen summer pulses humming as one.
Sitting on the porch steps with mah elbows propped on mah knees and mah chin resting in the palms of mah hands, ah let mah eyelids go lazy as the heat doped me like a drug.
Ah lobbed a bead of spittle over the crackling nettles that twisted up between the steps and watched the frothy pearl land in the dust and roll an inch or so, collecting a fine russet skin upon its outer surface, leaving in its wake a tiny furrow.
The red bead blocked the path of a bull ant which nudged at the boulder and, unable to budge it, spun in an angry circle and charged past it, feelers groping wildly. On its back it freighted a crumb. Weaving a little unner its burden, the intrepid ant mounted its hill, and no sooner had it disappeared down the hole at the hill’s crest than ah noticed a second bull ant, shouldering yet another crumb and similarly in a mad scramble to get to its nest. With increasing concern ah watched its progress across the block of shadow cast by the lower step, as it too hiked the face of the anthill, drumming the air wildly with its antennae in the same spastic flurry as its brother.
Ah yawned, rubbed mah face and looked again. Mah eyes had become accustomed to the crafty camouflage of these creatures, red as the earth upon which they scrambled, betrayed only by the bright speck of their burden. Ah saw that the hot dust swarmed with ants carrying a cargo of crumbs, in frantic flight, jockeying their way to the tip of the hill and piling into the hole that led to the mother-nest. The air was haywire with their giddy radar.
Ah know ants. Ah know them well. Well enough, that is, to know that something was gravely amiss – for in all mah years of studying ants ah have never known them to begin hoarding food so early in the summer months, never!